Advertising, business, journalism and wider society are all intrinsically linked by one major force of change: ethics
ETHICS Control the entire long-term prospects of your business, yet transient short-termism has led to an overall decline in ad success: why?
Advertising has been reinvented, interpreted and sold as a force for myriad functions; a creative force; a persuasive one; a form of branded content.
What it ultimately is though is a means of persuasion and enlightenment – there is ultimately commercial gain to be made by publicising your brand.
While this has been widely accepted as the consensus within business, baring the exception of a select few, the execution of advertising and its overall definition has been open to much conjecture.
Depending on your own individual business interests, you may have priorities regarding whether to identify consumers for instant response or long-term rapport and loyalty.
In both instances the directive should be unilaterally ethical – there can be no compromise as you aspire to carve out long-term industry success.
The battle to the bottom as it were has been waged by the subliminal and unethical practices utilised by Facebook for instance.
Targeting metrics that have swelled and becoming increasingly specific, have also precipitated a credibility and trust crisis between online users, the wider public and brands.
Such means of reaching people has led to confirmative advertising that has appealed to sentiment and fostered more segregated consumer brackets, fracturing long and short-term affirmation with innumerable consumers.
By appealing to pre-existant traits, engagement and belief systems to propagate business interests, you are not enlightening, empowering or helping your sales prospects as a whole.
Transient success is elicited thanks to the relevance, but as with all adverts that are moulded around instant responses; the overall success is tethered due to the inherent lack of long-term vision.
In order to mitigate this and instil a more trustworthy and ethical advertising output, your business needs to deviate from the current course of producing ads that stimulates pre-existing thoughts; your ads need to stimulate new ones.
However the conduit for this advertising material needs to provide the psychological compliments to what your consumers desire – with online only you are driving response through impulse, not long-term indexation.
This has ensured that businesses overall have been desperate to maximise the transient, as a result are soliciting sales as appose to engagement and rapport.
Through online display and the more personalised advertising content that you would think could foster personal resonance, your business is not advertising appropriately to consumers; they will not understand new products or services sufficiently to engage with your company beyond the click-through ads.
Ultimately this persuasion heavy, showcase and emotion weak directive contravenes the very ethical principles that provide your business with efficiency and long-term growth: the golden rule and mean.
Whether you are ingesting the news, watching a film or being taught something, ethics are considered in order to provide the most enlightenment and memorability.
From the production of content or information itself, to the accuracy and style of delivery, ethics form the foundations of much of everyday life.
Deontology – rule based thinking – underpins the framework of TV advertising, and in the evolving TV advertising spectrum, VOD.
Substantiation has to be made in order to protect the consumers you are advertising to; online this does not exist – perpetuating the miscarriage of ethics as many businesses have chosen to advertise online.
Not only does this breach the golden rule of ethics, relating to treating other people how you would wish to be treated, your adherence to any regulation or accountability is void.
As a result, the vulnerability of your brand from an emotive perspective is compromised online, notwithstanding the lack of protection from punitive measures.
Ultimately though with a promotion centric, persuasive tone, you cannot hope to create the progressive ads to place across TV, VOD and online outlets, which ensure that the entire moral compass of advertising reflects that of society; without it advertising will continue to regress needlessly.
Spending has been increasing near-exponentially, yet actual effectiveness has been in decline compared to TV and the increasingly digitally-driven iterations.
In order for online to provide the support necessary to TV and your business there needs to be increased accountability from within; a boycott at least of outlets that perpetuate advertising display that attempts to stifle both societal and industry progress.
With a focus on ethics, espousing facts and empowerment, ultimately adhering to both the ethical principles of the golden rule and deontology, your business will enjoy increased growth.
According to an Ebiquity survey, TV provides double the profits of online display, while 58% of TV ads elicit some form of emotional response, compared to just 2% of search display.
Space City has been producing TV, online and radio adverts for 25 years, embodying ethical principles to deliver commercials that elicit long-term resonance and sales potential.
Contact the team now and double your ROI and lower advertising costs by as much as 50% through working with the UK’s number one producers of cost effective commercials.
